The Cloud is Falling! The Cloud is Falling!

 

Earlier today, GMail went down hard. In the web interface, you might have seen these symptoms:

...taking longer than usual...

...502 server error...

...still working...

...encountered a problem...

And on the iPhone, you may have seen some of these:

In fact I am still seeing the SMTP problem on the right. But IMAP was working throughout the whole ordeal.

On Twitter, Facebook and the like, I immediately observed a lot of chatter about the perils of software as a service, how you can’t trust the cloud, and similar Chicken Little-type symptoms.  While GMail isn’t really “the cloud,” this outage shows that a virtually unlimited budget and some of the smartest minds in the industry can still leave points of failure.  One quote was, “See what happens?  Now imagine if that was something important!”

Well, e-mail is important, frankly. I make fun of social networking sites like Twitter, who fail to prepare for scale (or are simply blindsided by overnight success).  But in this case, I am not belittling the outcry at all, even from grandma waiting for her WalMart newsletter to arrive in her Inbox.  For companies like ours, that have switched from corporate platforms (read:Exchange + Office) to Google Docs, much of our work can come to an absolute standstill when this kind of thing happens. While it is not the end of the end, as the title of this post suggests, an outage of an hour (in this case it was about two hours) can range from a minor inconvenience to a complete disaster.  Don’t get me wrong; an hour without e-mail can often be like a mini-vacation, but it can also be very stressful.

I guess we’ll find out soon enough what this outage was all about. Several news outlets have already reported the issue (Washington Post, USA Today, NY Times).  The latter has instructions on how to check GMail server status.

In the meantime, what do you think?  Has this event changed your perception of GMail, the reliability of “local” e-mail services like Exchange or Lotus Notes, or Google’s ability to provide stable software-as-a-service?